Darkest England by Christopher Hope

Darkest England by Christopher Hope

Friday 21 August 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Friday 21 August 2009 19.01 EDT

David Mungo Booi, the descendent of a South African bush tribe, is on a mission for the Society for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of England to assess whether this remote isle is suitable for settlement and commercial exploitation. What he finds is a baffling, bad-tempered populace strangely obsessed with the weather: "If the rain fell for more than a week our attendants declared a flood and feared for their huts. If no rain fell for a fortnight they declared a drought and stopped washing themselves." The English, he reports, are also remarkably concerned with flatulence and hot air, "used as a method of political analysis for diagnosing what is wrong with themselves". It is the chief responsibility of a single-joke satire such as this to keep the laughs coming, and Hope's well of humour never dries up. But as the book first appeared in 1996, Booi's findings are beginning to seem out of date. "In England they pay pensions to those still young enough to enjoy them," he notes approvingly. It will be one less reason to move here once they've put a stop to that.